What is an event?

Before diving deep into the event naming convention, let us first understand what an event is. An event is an action performed by a user on a website or an app. An event could be a click on a particular link or a button. Let’s say someone clicks on CTA on your website, we will say an event has occurred.

Now let’s see what an event means for Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4.

Universal Analytics (UA) Event  

In Universal Analytics, events are user interactions on a website. These can not be tracked as a pageview in that session.

Let’s say a user comes to the website and watches a video. She then clicks the CTA and fills out the ‘Contact Us’ form. In such a scenario, Universal Analytics will report it as a pageview.

Event in UA consists of these four components:

1. Event Category - The name given to a group of events. For example 'Website Videos', and ' CTA'.
2. Event Action - The type of interaction that you wish to measure. For example ‘Contact Us Form Click’, and ‘Play Button’.
3. Event Label - It is the additional information that you add about specific website elements. It is optional to add an event label.
4. Event value - It is a numerical value and is assigned to an event. For example the number of downloads.

In essence, let’s say the website has three contact us forms and you wish to have data of all three of those, then category can be ‘Forms’, action can be ‘Submit’, and label can be the individual text on button or label.

Thus in universal analytics, an event is created for tracking the action within the web page. And the data is sent as a ‘hit’.

Type of hits defined in universal analytics:

• Pageview hit
• Event hit
• E-commerce hit
• Social interactions hit
• Exception hit
• User timing hit
• Screen hit (for apps)

Google Analytics 4 Event

As we know that in UA event is designed for tracking action within the web page. However, in GA4 event is designed to send all types of data. Be it action, user detail, page views, or any other information on the website.

In UA, data is sent as different hits. Whereas in GA4, everything is considered as an event. 

Let us understand this difference with an example.

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In the image given above, the parameter name for GA4 is vague. The parameter names should be defined such that it clearly mentions what the event tracks. Like the one shown in the image below.

Where to find the event name in Google Tag Manager (GTM) for GA4? 

In your GTM account, go to create a new GA4 event tag. 

You will see the Event Name as marked in the image below.

It can be a static or a dynamic value.

Recommended naming convention of event name in GA4

Tagmate recommends event name convention as per below.

• First, write down all the events that you want to track.

• Now check, whether they fall into 

1. Automatically collected 
2. Enhanced measurement, or
3. Recommended events 

• Check the naming convention in the lists on the pages given above and apply it. 

• Check the character limit for the event name.

• The event name must be meaningful and it must represent what it actually tracks.

• Use snake case for the names. For example, video_progress, form_submit, scroll_page, and view_search_results.

• An event name can consist of alphabets, numbers, and underscores. However, it must start with the alphabet.

Let’s say you need to track video start, video interaction, and video completion. Then the event names could be:

Event model name character limit in GA4

Google has set character limits for the event model as shown below.

If you exceed the character limit, GA4 will throw an error. The codes for various types of errors are shown below.

Suggested event names as per your industry or business type

Ecommerce 

The number of events an e-commerce business needs to track is humongous. We suggest the following event names for some common e-commerce events.

Blogs/Publishing Websites

If you have a blog or a publishing website, we suggest the following event names for some common events.

Online Tutorial/Videos/OTT 

Let’s say you have an OTT platform or a tutorial website, or you have lots of videos placed on your website. Then we suggest you the following event names for some common events.

Lead generation/Banking & Financial‍

Lead generation websites, affiliates, banking and financial organization are having wide spread online business and they all need to track events, We suggested events and its naming conventions as per below.

In essence, one must ensure to maintain consistency in naming events so that it becomes easier while analyzing reports.

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